Episode Revenant is coming to an end and Episode Heresy launches tomorrow, so now is a great time to look back and have a conversation as to whether Revenant has been a success. Bungie tried out some new things this episode, there were some hits and misses. Today let’s have a look back with my Episode Revenant review.

First of all, let’s start with the story. This is the first new experiment Bungie tried this season, dropping all the story beats at the start of the Acts. While this was good from a story perspective, I think it showed cracks in how we interact with the story.

This episode focused on Fikrul, Crow, Eido, Eramis and Mithrax. Fikrul had come into possesion of the Echo and was tranforming Eliksni into Scorn. Eido felt pity for Eramis and wanted to include her in the process of defeating Fikrul, and Eramis ultimately ended up on top, cleansing Mithrax of his curse and leaving the Sol system to establish a new home-world for the Eliksni. We’re no doubt going to visit once we leave the Sol system when Destiny 2 Frontiers rolls around later in 2025 and beyond.

While Bungie dropped all the story beats at the start of the three individual acts, the way we interacted with the story didn’t change. We were still going from vendor to terminal, often speaking to the same NPC via the Termnial when we’re standing next to them. The cutscenes were high quality as normal, in particular the story beats with Fikrul displaying Daddy-issues with Crow. We were able to fly through the story, often repeating tasks or activities. While this isn’t surprising, the way the story was dropped in one go shone the light on how Bungie deliver their story. Under focus, it doesn’t hold up. We need a shake up. Bungie did mention on the Heresy reveal stream they are experimenting further next Episode, and hopefully we’ll see systematic changes in the next major release, hopefully coming later in 2025.

Overall, the story improved from Episode Echoes, but I’d still give it a 6/10.

Next up we have the activities. Bungie introduced a slight variation with Onslaught Salvation, building on the success of Into The Light. We had new maps, new enemies and a focus on stasis. This was a nice addition for a few runs, but quickly became stale. Full runs on expert could take nearly an hour to complete and there’s only so many times I want to run through this activity. A large part of what made Onsalught compelling the first time was freshness of the activity itself, plus the exceptional loot. Bungie essentially brought back the best weapons from Destiny 2’s history and made them easy to get, plus added shiney variants. Here we had seasonal weapons, and only a handful.

In Act 2 Tomb of Elders was introduced, a revamped version of Prison of Elders from the House of Wolves days of Destiny 1. Personally I enjoyed this activity a lot, it’s good to go back into the Prison of Elders, plus there were enough changes to make it feel fresh. A few more weapons were added, plus we had the return of Season of the Splicer weapons too.

In Act 3 we had a new exotic mission, which was just OK. It felt similar to a long story mission, and while the exotic shotgun is a nice additon to the game, similar to the story mechanics the exotic mission structure of running through, then running again week-over-week to get the catalysts has gotten stale. Given the changes to the story delivery this time all 3 catalysts dropped at the same time, leading to running through the exotic mission back to back 3 times. Not good. It is worth pointing out the addition of the organ, which allowed for some excellent social clips.

Next up we had the loot. The seasonal weapons were pretty good, plus the reissued splicer weapons. Iron Banner saw a stasis rocket assisted sidearm, plus had Slayer’s Fang from Kell’s Fall, which is a nice additional to the arsenal. Vantage Point, the Pulse Rifle, and Bitter/Sweet, the heavy grenade launcher were the stand out weapons for me. We also had the Dungeon weapons, but I will get to those in a minute.

Crafting has been removed, and a convoluted Tonic system was introduced to help focus loot. Rather than simply selecting the weapon you want to focus, like we had with Into The Light, we had to craft a tonic with ingrendients or reagents, then mix it, then drink it, and even then it didn’t always feel like you would get the loot you wanted. I do applaude Bungie for trying new things, and introducing this element of alchemy into the game, but it didn’t hit the mark, and I think was riddled with bugs, which led to a less than satisfactory gameplay experience.

Talking about bugs it was clear this season that the bugs are taking their toll on the overall gameplay experience. We used to have one or two bugs with major releases, but this episode the bugs were so rampant it started to erode the trust between the player base and Bungie. The tonic system is probably the best example, where in-game instructions would lead you to focus weapons, but you would get what you wanted, leaving us fans now knowing if something was working or not. Then we had the whole weightgate issue, where certain perk patterns were identified by the community, which were perk combinations that felt impossible to get. This led to a massive investigation by players, then by Bungie, and ultimately ended up with Bungie apologising saying “Yes, there is a bug here” and dishing out apology loot from Banshee-44. It’s all a big mess tbh. Hopefully Bungie will invest in QA and increase the quality of releases to us in the future.

Next we should talk about the dungeon, Vesper’s Host. This is the high point of the season for me. Bungie, again, tried something new here by elevating dungeons to raid status and holding a dungeon race on day 1. The dungeon itself is good, even though it’s reusing some of the mechanics from Deep Stone Crypt. I don’t mind this so much, because they are good mechanics. We saw the return of Icebreaker, and that hasn’t run rampant in the game. That may be due to the drop rate being so small. I’ve run the dungeon multiple times and still haven’t got it, but next time I’m going to try contest mode to try and avoid this situation. All the loot was great from Vesper’s Host with Chill Inhibitor and Velocity Baton being the highlights and weapons I use still to this day.

We had some seasonal events in there too including Festival of the Lost and The Dawning. No major changes to these events, except for accidentally giving away the upgraded event card. If you’ve played a seasonal event in Destiny 2, then you know what to expect here.

Player numbers have dropped throughout the season, with many larger content creators like Aztecross and Datto branching out into variety content or spawning. Player numbers have dropped to very low levels with a high of 36k average players on Steam and December seeing the lowest player population of 20k across the month. In 2023 we saw lows of 33k, so year over year the player count is dropping. This is startng to effect in-game playlists, it’s harder to get a raid group together and PVP playlists are filled with the same players over and over.

Bungie needs to do something to mix things up with Destiny 2. The game, the gameplay loops, maps and modes have existed for 11 years now, and players are drifting away in larger number than ever before. I am hopeful Bungie will be able to bring players back with Frontiers, starting with Apollo later in 2025. However, with a reduced staff, dwindling player counts, and the development team split between Destiny and Marathon, the road ahead looks more uncertain than ever.

Let me know what you think in the comments.